View full sizeOLIVIA BUCKS/The OregonianBulldozers, in a photograph taken in 2005, work to cover construction materials deposited at the Lakeside Reclamation Landfill near the Tualatin River west of Tigard.

A long-running fight pitting a controversial Washington County reclamation site against state and county regulators and adjoining property owners is likely to rekindle Thursday during what would otherwise be a routine rate-review hearing in Hillsboro.

Representatives for Howard Grabhorn's Lakeside Reclamation Landfill are asking a county advisory committee to recommend approval of its request to continue composting activities on its 40-acre site near the Tualatin River.

A county staff report, however, recommends that the Board of Commissioners not renew Grabhorn's solid-waste franchise permit.

Wendie L. Kellington, Grabhorn's attorney, said the county is misinterpreting its own regulations in recommending the denial. She has already filed two motions with the Oregon Supreme Court in attempts to bolster her argument that composting on the site is an allowable use.

The court, so far, has not responded to the requests, which ask the court to advise Washington County Circuit Court judges that they have the authority to help untangle some of the legal knots tying up the case.

Even so, Kellington said, the matter should never have gotten this far.

"The county is saying, since we can't figure out if we've ever approved you as a compost facility before, then you haven't proved you are a compost facility,'' Kellington said. "They are wrong. We've been composting all along and they know this. The amnesia the county is now claiming to have is simply belied by the facts."

A county staff report disagrees, saying that the current franchise agreement, issued in October 2000, makes no mention of composting activity and contains no terms or conditions for composting operations.

Grabhorn's current franchise agreement expires June 30. The matter is of some moment, given that county ordinances provide that franchise agreements will be automatically renewed if no action is otherwise taken to deny or renew them.

"Lakeside is saying they've been composting since the early 1990s or before and therefore it is grandfathered in as a non-conforming use,'' said Dan R. Olsen, Washington County counsel. "That may be true, but we just don't know. There is a process to determine all of that and they have not availed themselves of that process."

This is not the first time the facility, which began operations in 1957, has encountered dust-ups with neighbors, regulators and environmental groups.

"What we have are a lot of noisy opponents who don't like having moved their nice houses to where there's been an active landfill operation for decades," Kellington said. "They would like to shut Howard down and make miserable the lives of people who need to follow the rules and recognize that this is merely a franchise renewal."

She said she expects the county's Solid Waste Advisory Committee, which begins its meeting at 10 a.m. Thursday in Hillsboro, to rule in her client's favor by recommending subsequent renewal of the franchise permit by county commissioners.

"It should be quick and straight-forward," she said. "The rest is just so much political dead fish."

The meeting will be held in the Charles D. Cameron Public Services Building, 155 N. First Ave.